Informative and/or amusing since 2010… Have a tale to tell about your travels or expat experience? Send it on in to gnomeless.com@gmail.com.

Europe 2010 MVP

We’ve been back in South Korea for about a week now. How long we’ll stay this time is anybody’s guess – anywhere from one month to one year. It’s good to be back, too, because there is still so much left to write about. But before I get to all that, I feel I must give props to the one item that KJ and I simply could not have done without during our eleven-week tour around Europe. So now I shall announce the Europe 2010 MVP.

The envelope please…

And the winner is our little Cosco fold-up stroller!

Very early on in our European travels, KJ and I realized this was the one piece of gear we could not live without. We could easily replace any backpacks and clothes that might get lost, ruined or stolen.

Even losing our passports would have been preferable to losing “the buggy”. Passports can be replaced. But it would have been extremely difficult to find another fold-up stroller as good as “the buggy”.

We got the buggy second-hand from my dad’s fiancée, and it’s about as unprepossessing a thing as you’ve ever seen. The canvas bit has slightly garish multicolored stripes and the frame has a couple flecks of rust. However, it has four outstanding features:

It is sturdy;

It is easy to fold up;

It is great for restraining your kid when you get tired of carrying him and/or when his little legs and short attention span mean you can’t get where you want to go as quickly as you need to; and

It’s fantastic for carrying your daypack and whatever else you can strap on to the buggy while your kid is on the prowl.

So a big thanks to the buggy, the runaway winner of the Europe 2010 MVP Award.

Our little Cosco buggy at Cambridge University. Great for keeping Ian where we wanted him when we wanted him to be where we wanted him.

When Ian was out of the buggy, it was darned handy for carrying our daypack and other stuff that wouldn't fit in it.